


The Least We Have to Dread

by involuntaryorange



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Fluff, Inception Bingo, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Some vague allusions to smut but not enough to warrant an M rating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-12-02 22:50:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11519136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/involuntaryorange/pseuds/involuntaryorange
Summary: Try as he might, Eames can't seem to win over the object of his affection.(Written for the "Unrequited Love" square of Inception Bingo. Don't worry, it's not what you think. This is an IO fic, after all.)





	The Least We Have to Dread

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from W.H. Auden’s poem “The More Loving One”: “But on earth indifference is the least / We have to dread from man or beast.”
> 
> A million thanks to kedgeree11 for her beta!

“Darling,” Eames pleads, “just give me a chance. I swear you won’t regret it.”

The only response he gets is a distrustful glare.

“Please?” Eames lowers himself to his knees on the living room rug. He’s not above humiliating himself. “I brought you a gift!”

Silence.

“It has catnip _and_ a jingle bell!” Eames proffers the small stuffed mouse, shaking it a bit to make it jingle.

Green eyes narrow and flick away. The object of his entreaties begins licking her own arse.

“Eames, this is just pathetic,” Arthur says from where he’s standing in the kitchen doorway, one eyebrow raised in judgment.

“I want her to like me!”

“Frida doesn’t succumb to bribery.” Upon hearing her name, Frida murps happily and trots over to Arthur. He leans over and scratches under her chin. Eames could swear they _both_ look smug.

“Her fur looks so _soft_ ,” Eames whimpers.

“It is.” Definitely smug.

“I hate you both.”

“No, you don’t.”

 

=^•.•^=   =^•.•^=  =^•.•^=

 

Frida likes to lie down in Arthur’s lap while he and Eames are watching the telly. She’ll jump up over the arm of the sofa, pad her little white paws into his legs while giving Eames a haughty look, and plop herself down with a Cobb-caliber sigh. Arthur will bury a hand in her fur and she’ll purr loudly, and just when she appears to be drifting off to sleep, Eames will cautiously reach over to pet her… and suddenly her eyes will pop back open and she’ll bite him. Every single time.

“Your cat is a hellion,” Eames whines, sucking at his hand.

“Oh, come on, she never breaks the skin. Don’t be a baby.” Arthur changes the channel to something with more explosions, completely ignoring Eames’s gaping flesh wound. Frida rubs her head against Arthur’s forearm. Smugly.

“Your cat is a bloody tease, is what she is.”

“Now you’re just blaming the victim.”

“ _I’m_ the victim!” Eames protests. “I’m the one who needs stitches!”

“Show me,” Arthur says, and Eames holds out his hand. “Huh, yeah,” Arthur says, delicately running his fingers along the tender skin between Eames’s thumb and forefinger. “We might have to amputate this.”

Eames tries to huff, but it gets caught in his throat when Arthur brings Eames’s hand to his mouth and kisses his palm. The huff is sucked back into Eames’s lungs on a gasp when the tip of Arthur’s tongue emerges from between his lips and trails a line down to Eames's wrist.

Eames leans forward to add his own mouth to the proceedings but is swiftly rebuffed by a hiss and a paw swipe.

“Cockblocked by a bloody cat,” Eames mutters.

 

=^•.•^=   =^•.•^=  =^•.•^=

 

It's not like Arthur chooses Frida over Eames. (That's why Eames doesn’t actually _resent_ Frida so much as desperately crave her love.) He seems more amused than concerned by their rancor, and keeps reassuring Eames that she’ll warm up to him, that he’s trying too hard to win her affection. At night he’ll lock her out of the bedroom and tackle Eames to the bed, ride him until Eames has forgotten about recalcitrant cats and his own name and place of birth and anything that isn’t the feeling of Arthur slick and sweaty on top of him.

And then afterwards he’ll open the bedroom door and Frida will come scurrying in from where she was scratching and whining, and she’ll jump up on the bed — conspicuously avoiding the side where Eames is sprawled — and curl up near Arthur’s pillow to sleep.

Sometimes Eames could swear he remembers waking up in the middle of the night to a furry tail in his mouth, but in the mornings Frida is always as far away from his face as possible, draped across Arthur’s feet, dead asleep.

 

=^•.•^=   =^•.•^=  =^•.•^=

 

“What are you doing?” Arthur asks.

“I’m slow-blinking at Frida.”

“Right. I guess I meant _why_ are you doing whatever you’re doing.”

“The internet said that that’s how you tell a cat you love them. Because they don’t understand English.” Eames is almost sure Frida understands English, though. She’s devious. Devious, and clever, and sleek, and haughty, and _clearly_ Eames has a weakness for those qualities or he wouldn’t have been in a position to meet Frida in the first place.

“Is it working?”

“I’m not sure. She’s just staring at me.”

“Try petting her.”

“What sort of fool do you take me for?”

“Once bitten, twice shy,” Arthur says.

“ _Once_? More like two hundred times bitten, completely rationally shy!” Still, Eames inches a hand forward, because he hasn’t gotten where he is in life by giving up easily. Frida drops to her haunches and gives a low warning growl. “All right, all right, you haughty bitch,” Eames grunts, easing off.

Arthur laughs.

“I don’t actually think you’re a bitch,” Eames clarifies, because he really is rather certain that Frida comprehends English.

“You know she can’t understand you, right?” Arthur asks, slow-blinking at Eames.

“That’s what _you_ think,” Eames says, slow-blinking back.

 

=^•.•^=   =^•.•^=  =^•.•^=

 

When it finally happens, Eames is totally unprepared. He’s lying on the couch, reading a magazine, when he feels four tiny little weights on his stomach. He slowly lifts the magazine up, fully expecting to find that a raccoon has somehow wandered in through an open window, but instead he discovers Frida perched atop him, sniffing at his shirt. He holds his breath as she stomps around a bit — honestly, aren’t cats supposed to be light on their feet? — and then, apparently having sufficiently tenderized his abdomen, lies down.

Eames waits until she’s asleep before he hisses _“_ _Arthur!_ _”_ as frantically as he can manage without disturbing her. _“_ _Arthur! Come here!”_

He hears Arthur run into the living room behind him. “Eames? What’s wrong?”

Eames shushes him and gestures toward his lap with the magazine. _“I_ _t’s finally happening_ _,”_ he whispers.

Arthur lets out a sigh of relief and comes around to the side of the couch. “Shit, you scared me.”

 _“Why are you naked,_ _”_ Eames whispers.

“I was coming to ask if you wanted to fuck.”

Eames whimpers. He looks desperately between Frida, curled up on his stomach and softly snoring, and Arthur’s delectable cock. The universe has never been this cruel to anybody before. There will be a novel written about this someday, he thinks. _Eames’s Choice._ It will be made into a movie, and the role of Eames, Rakish International Criminal, will be played, however improbably, by Meryl Streep.

_“Could it possibly wait until Frida wakes up?”_

Arthur rolls his eyes and mutters something that sounds like “cockblocked by a bloody cat” as he walks back out of the living room, and Eames considers it another sign of the universe’s inherent unfairness that he can’t quite crane his neck enough to watch Arthur’s bum as he leaves.

Frida twitches in her sleep and lets out an adorable little grumble, rubbing the side of her face against Eames’s shirt.

Arthur can wait. Probably. Eames is like 60% sure Arthur won’t start without him.

**Author's Note:**

> Frida is a long-haired tuxedo cat, in case you were wondering. And yes, she's named after Frida Kahlo.


End file.
